Abstract
Popular movies, novels, and television series help make our politics by making our myths. These are the symbolic stories that shape and make sense of what people do.2 It’s easy to see political mythmaking in movies like Argo (2012), Lincoln (2012), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012). Each concerns historical figures in the official, if sometimes secret, politics of government.3 When we see Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) of the CIA rescuing American diplomats from a hostile Iran, or we see “Maya” (Jessica Chastain) of the CIA tracking Osama bin Laden to his death in Pakistan, we need not see James Bond (Daniel Craig) resurrected in Skyfall (2012) to know that covert operations are back in heroic vogue. When we watch President Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) shaving truths, trading jobs for votes, or otherwise playing gutter-ball to outlaw slavery, none of us misses that the current occupant of the Oval Office has a mighty model for stooping to compromise—and “get things done.”
Americans don’t read books;
Americans don’t read newspapers;
Americans go to the movies.1
—Stephen Colbert
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Notes
See Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By, New York, Viking Press, 1972;
Henry Tudor, Political Myth, New York, Praeger, 1972;
H. Mark Roelofs, Ideology and Myth in American Politics, Boston, Little, Brown, 1976;
James Oliver Robertson, American Myth, American Reality, New York, Hill and Wang, 1980;
Dora C. Pozzi and John M. Wickersham, eds., Myth and the Polis, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1991.
Also see Geoffrey Hill, Illuminating Shadows: The Mythic Power of Film, Boston, Shambhala, 1992;
John Izod, Myth, Mind and the Screen: Understanding the Heroes of Our Time, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
See Phillip L. Gianos, Politics and Politicians in American Film, Westport, CT, Praeger, 1998.
See Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1981.
See Kiku Adatto, “Mythic Pictures: The Maverick Heroes in American Movies,” Picture Perfect, New York, Basic Books, 1993, pp. 124–166;
John Izod, Myth, Mind and the Screen: Understanding the Heroes of Our Time, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
See Laurence A. Rickels, The Vampire Lectures, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Gore Vidal, “Reel History,” New Yorker 73, no. 34, November 10, 1997, pp. 112–120, on p. 115.
See Gore Vidal, Screening History, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1992.
Also see Gore Vidal, The Narratives of Empire, New York, Random House: Burr, 1974; 1876, 1976; Lincoln, 1984; Empire, 1987; Hollywood, 1990; The Golden Age, 2000.
See John S. Nelson, “Conspiracy as a Hollywood Trope for System,” Political Communication 20, no. 4 (October–December 2003): 499–503.
See John Fiske, Reading the Popular, Boston, Unwin Hyman, 1989;
John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, New York, Routledge, 1989.
See Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, New York, World, 1949.
See G. R. Boynton and John S. Nelson, “Orchestrating Politics,” Hot Spots: Multimedia Analyses of Political Ads, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1997, third chapter of a videocassette.
See Dan D. Nimmo, Popular Images of Politics, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1974;
Dan D. Nimmo and James E. Combs, Subliminal Politics: Myths and Mythmakers in America, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1980;
Dan D. Nimmo and James E. Combs, Mediated Political Realities, New York, Longman (1983), 2nd ed., 1990;
Geoffrey Hill, Illuminating Shadows: The Mythic Power of Film, Boston, Shambhala, 1992;
Michael Parenti, Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1992;
Michael Parenti, Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
See John S. Nelson, Tropes of Politics: Science, Theory, Rhetoric, Action, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1998, pp. 115–204.
See Barry Keith Grant, ed., Film Genre Reader, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1986.
See Jane Gaines, ed., “Film and TV Theory Today,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 321–539; Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, eds., Transnational Cinema, New York, Routledge, 2006.
Niccolò Machiavelli, in The Prince, Robert M. Adams, ed. and trans., New York, Norton (1975), 2nd ed., 1992, p. 42.
See Thomas More, in Utopia, Robert M. Adams, ed., New York, Norton (1975), 2nd ed., 1992.
See Isadore Traschen, “Pure and Ironic Idealism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 59, no. 2 (Spring 1960): 1673–170.
See Kenneth Burke, “Realism and Idealism,” Dial 74 (1923): 97–99.
See Roman Jakobson, “On Realism in Art (1921),” in language in literature, Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, eds., Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 19–27.
Also see Nelson Goodman, “Realism, Relativism, and Reality,” New literary History 14, no. 2 (Winter 1983): 269–272;
W J. T. Mitchell, “Realism, Irrealism, and Ideology: After Nelson Goodman,” Picture Theory, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 345–362.
See Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1995;
Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism: The New Critical Idiom, New York, Routledge, 2004;
Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative, Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.
See Roberto Mangabeira Unger, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1987: False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, 1987; Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task, 1987; Plasticity into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies of the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success, 1987.
Also see David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Brooklyn, Melville House, 2011;
David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, New York, Random House, 2013.
See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1981.
See Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995;
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London, Routledge, 1979;
Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, New York, Basic Books, 1988;
Barry Brummett, A Rhetoric of Style, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 2008.
See John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 1–27; Nelson, Tropes of Politics, pp. 150–179.
On Hollywood films as popular movies for Americans, see Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1995.
See J. P. Telotte, Science Fiction Film, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Also see John S. Nelson, “Political Mythmaking for Postmoderns,” Spheres of Argument, in Bruce E. Gronbeck, ed., Annandale, VA, Speech Communication Association, 1989, pp. 175–183.
See Olaf Stapledon, Odd John, New York, Garland (1936), 1975;
Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
Also see Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City, New York, Knopf, 1969;
Doris Lessing, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, New York, Knopf, 1971;
Doris Lessing, Canopus in Argos: Archives, New York, Knopf: Shikasta, 1979; The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, 1980; The Sirian Experiments, 1980; The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, 1982; The Sentimental Agents, 1983.
See John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976.
See Rikke Schubart, “Passion and Acceleration: Generic Change in the Action Film,” in Violence and American Cinema, J. David Slocum, ed., New York, Routledge, 2001, pp. 192–207;
Eric Lichtenfeld, Action Speaks louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie, Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press (2004), expanded edition, 2007.
See Machiavelli, The Prince; Harvey Mansfield Jr., Machiavelli’s Virtue, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1966;
Martin Fleisher, ed., Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought, New York, Atheneum, 1972;
Michael Ledeen, Machiavelli on Modern leadership, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
See Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. and trans., New York, Oxford University Press, 1946, pp. 196–244;
Hannah Arendt, “Race and Bureaucracy,” The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1951, 1958), 4th ed., 1973, pp. 185–221; Robert Hariman, “A Boarder in One’s Own Home: Franz Kafka’s Parable of the Bureaucratic Style,” Political Style, pp. 141–176.
See John S. Nelson, “Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture,” in Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice, Robert Hariman, ed., University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003, pp. 229–257.
See Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979, pp. 1–15;
Samuel R. Delany, “About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words,” The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Essays on Science Fiction, New York, Berkley Books, 1977, pp. 21–37;
Mark Rose, Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1981, p. 20.
See Mark Rose, ed., Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1976.
Tom Godwin, “The Cold Equations,” in Approaches to Science Fiction, Donald L. Lawler, ed., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1978, pp. 232–252.
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© 2013 John S. Nelson
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Nelson, J.S. (2013). Introduction Doing Political Theory with Popular Films: Styles in Action in Everyday Life. In: Popular Cinema as Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373861_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373861_1
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